A brief interuption from all the fantabulous drawings to lust after Typotheque’s 2007 planner/sketchbook. Perhaps a bit early to think about your own personal DrawYear! but hey, this is pretty shiny. And for all the designers/type nerds out there (I see you) there’s grids in the front for sketching type. Love the placeholding ribbon, too. (is there another name for that?) Happy Day 9 everybody.
I know Drawmo is supposed to be about drawing and not painting, but I was so inspired by Elizabeth Perry’s “Woolgathering” blog (and I enjoy watercoloring with my daughter so much) that I plan on doing some watercolor painting this month too. So here are my implements of destruction, from right to left:
And, at the top, today’s unintended splurge buys:
I was originally planning on doing all my drawing with just ballpoint and index cards, plus the tiny watercolor kit, but I have a way of getting seduced by new materials, especially if they’re packaged cleverly. Ah well. On to the drawing!
BTW, I am tagging all of my Drawmo posts in Flickr with the tag “drawmo” — might be a handy way to find stuff even if it hasn’t been explicitly sent to the Flickr group or blogged here.
Since I gave some of the who-am-I over in comments, I thought I would post about tools. Without having to buy anything new at all, I am ready for DrawMo with the following stuff:
Even though he says he can’t draw (and isn’t doing DrawMo because of other pressing commitments like NaNoWriMo), my husband really wants to draw and over time has bought more in the way of art supplies than I ever had. So I raided his stash and came up with two sketch pads that are small enough to tote around with me. One is 5.5 by 8.5 which is a little large for the small purse but then I found a teeny tiny pad only 3.5 by 5 so I have no excuses.
I can’t remember when I bought the watercolour pencils – perhaps around the time of my last drawing, about ten years ago. They’ve never been used and are still in mint condition. Maybe if I remain afraid of them, I will eventually be able to sell them on the Antiques Road Show.
The pencils in the plastic box are much better used and in fact, I have replaced the 6B and apparently have used up the 2B as it isn’t in there. Once I took a course from an artist who used a mechanical pencil and was struck by the convenience of not having to sharpen it. I tend to draw very small anyway so the fine point of a mechanical pencil works for me. Of course, the problem as always with pencil is that it smudges so I think I am going to dare to use a pen of some description – well, we will see.
Finally, the viewing square was introduced to me when I took a year long art class at Queen’s back in 1978. I had one about 4 inches square on the inside but I couldn’t find it and anyway, I wanted one smaller so I just made myself this one, three inches on a side (I made it from matte board – Peter frames his own photographs and we have plenty of matte board scraps to go around). The idea is that you look through the square at anything and it abstracts what you are looking at and isolates the pattern or the interest of it. I didn’t do many sketches with it and only ever did them as an exercise assigned by the teacher. But I liked every one I did so I thought it could help get me going on “what on earth do I draw?”
If you’re planning to participate in DrawMo! and are not doing so because you’ve already got a ton of paper and art supplies that you never use, now is the time to start gathering some tools.
Or not. It would be perfectly cool to draw with ballpoint pens on napkins for the entire month—or on business cards, as Hugh MacLeod does.
But in case you do want to splurge on some art supplies, I thought perhaps we could ease the anticipatory tension a bit by talking about what kind of materials we like to use.
Me, I’ve always loved Caran d’Ache water-soluble colored pencils. You can use them dry, on dry paper, just like normal pencils, or you can draw on wet paper, or you can use a wet pencil on dry paper, or a wet pencil on wet paper, or you can draw dry and then brush all or part of the drawing with water, or . . . you get the idea.
The tin of pencils I just bought even came with a little multilingual booklet explaining the many ways you might want to use them. These pencils are not cheap, of course—a tin of twelve cost me about $23 at Dick Blick. But they also had another brand—Winsor Newton, maybe? Derwent—for way less. So shop around. Has anybody used a different brand?
Another medium I like is, perhaps not surprisingly, India ink. I used this a lot during the Pleistocene era (i.e., in college), with a brush and water. I really liked that it’s permanent—though this can be a hazard if you’re the clumsy type—and that if you mix it with a tiny bit of soap, you can paint just about any surface, no matter how slick. So you might want to play with that.
As for paper, I’ll be using a thus-far-mostly-empty Moleskine, because I have it already, and because I would like it to stop emitting mutation-causing Guilt Rays. But in olden days I used to like spiral-bound pads of watercolor paper.
Ye who already actually draw, what do you like to use? Elizabeth, I know, has a very interesting post on this: a few notes on my materials… . . .
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